Today’s guest blog comes from Lexie Bee (she/her), a new writer to C&K! Lexie is here to talk about her journey to understanding her demisexual identity and the role that emotional intimacy plays in her sexual attractions.
In brief, a person is demisexual if they only experience sexual attraction in the context of emotional intimacy. Demisexuality is part of the asexual (ace) spectrum and some consider it one form that greysexuality. The header image for this post shows the demisexual pride flag.
I can’t believe that in over 8 years of this site, I’ve never published a piece about demisexuality! It’s time we rectified that.
Amy x
The Demisexual Slut by Lexie Bee
I’ve been dating since I was 4 years old—I was something of an “early bloomer” in that department. It’s hard to tell if liking boys was a chicken or an egg situation; was my attraction to them something I’d possessed since the womb, or had I acquired it during my hyper-feminized childhood upbringing? All I’ve ever known is that if there’s a boy, I should be interested.
This ideology led me to be a smallish, slightly sizable super romantic:
I was in love with love.
Having a boyfriend was always on my mind, even before I hit puberty.
In preschool, there was…
– Bradley, a spiky blonde-haired boy who would kiss my hand under the pre-K playhouse.
And in elementary…
– Eric, the little Black boy in my Bible school class who gave me a necklace.
– Kyhlen and Noah, the only two Black boys in 4th grade (which meant I had to like them, since y’know, I was one of the only Black girls in the 4th grade class—and Cultural-CompHet was a lesson many years in the future.)
In middle school…
– Raymond, a sunkissed and freckled country boy who played the fiddle next to me in orchestra.
– Bailey, Joseph, and Tyler, the aptly aged trio of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who were childhood friends in my neighborhood and simultaneously pining for my affection.
And in high school, I fell for Nathaniel and Seth and Devin and Ryan and Grady and Alex…
…In college, Corbin and Mitch and Josh and Jack…
…After college, Duncan and Ben and Daniel…
And about 50 or so others!
Yes, the Autism in me made a list of EVERY guy who had a romantic tie to me, based on the central premise of the book The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart.
Maybe it was because I always felt inferior in both the looks and personality departments, or maybe it was because I saw the world through bubblegum pink glasses. But all I knew is that I wanted to be wanted.
It was the one never-ending quest: to find my Happily Ever After.
I didn’t discover that I had ADHD or very unhealthy anxiety until I was 19 and having a mental breakdown after my first year of college. It wouldn’t be until I was 24 that someone would tell me they thought I was on the spectrum, and that everyone else “thought I knew.” For my 25th birthday, I discovered that my surely delusional paranoia would be validated as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
In other words, I’ve always been something of an awkward, oddly-behaved duck.
But without even realizing it, I had become an avid hyper-fixator on two of the most universal concepts of them all:
LOVE & SEX.
My first boyfriend was deemed a dork who would be forever alone. And I was the girl-dork who, people assumed, would also be forever alone. So we decided to date. If you can’t beat ‘em, outsmart them. Play to win.
There was a sort of power in being able to tell others I was spoken for, even if by the least desired guy around. It meant that no matter how uncool I was, I was at least cool enough to score a date. This social currency would carry me into my adulthood. So, like anyone who becomes an expert in their field, I planned and practiced.
I had a multitude of methods at my disposal, which went roughly like this:
STEP 1: Never miss your shot. Anyone could be THE ONE.
After I hit puberty, no guy was off the table for consideration. Humiliation be damned—if he could breathe, he could and would be asked out by me. Or flirted with, at the very least.
STEP 2: PLAN PLAN PLAN.
Knowledge wasn’t just power. It was precision. I had my first kiss a month shy of my 14th birthday and lost my virginity the week after my high school graduation at an amusement park motel; nothing too far from ordinary. What no one else knew was that there was 4 years’ worth of bookmarks telling me how to kiss with tongue, folded Cosmopolitan magazines with instructions how to pleasure a perineum, and copious peer-reviewed evidence in the form of sex blogs highlighted.
I wouldn’t just have sex. I’d win sex.
STEP 3: JUST DO IT
I had my first one-night stand on a drunk guy’s floor at the end of my first semester in college. He gave me strep throat, ruined a blockbuster film I wanted to see, and I would occasionally have an awkward encounter of seeing him ride the same campus bus for the rest of the year.
One day, after he was kicked out of college, my high school crush reached out to me to rekindle our friendship. After a year of asynchronously communicating, he rented a hotel room for an hour to have sex with me. Midway through, he made a comment on my performance that would inspire me to become a power-bottom from that point on. My anxiety about being considered “bad in bed” told me that if guys desired girls who are good at sex, then that’s the girl I needed to be. Bad sex = no sex = unattractive to the male sex.
That night, shortly after he finished, we sat beside each other on the hotel bed and without hesitation both proceeded to open and scroll on Tinder. I pretended that I didn’t care about his apathy to our reunion after those few years. I brushed away the sinking fear in my gut that I had been used.
Over time, I kept a log of everyone I had slept with. But it was becoming harder to remember the names or even faces of those people after those first few encounters. Anytime sex was asked for or offered, I took the opportunity.
Every date, good or bad, became a hookup. Think of it like an unpaid internship on a resume; a crappy job was still one you could reference. And that experience was accompanied by the liberation of being a young adult in college with my own agency, in tandem with the maturation of my body, to give out something of my own that was ALWAYS valued.
I wouldn’t have traded that feeling for the world.
To me, sex seemed like trophy hunting. It was silly and funny to laugh about dating, about how goofy it was, about the situations I would end up in. And I enjoyed being an expert at something that I thought I was, by nature, supposed to be good at. Failed dates became my friends, and sometimes my friends with extra benefits.
Sex was just…sex.
I enjoyed giving my partners pleasure. So it didn’t matter if, throughout the sex, I was thinking about what I was going to eat for dinner.
Sex itself was boring. The story leading up to it was always more interesting than the sex itself. I never orgasmed, and most of the time I never even came close. Most men didn’t mind that I didn’t mind. And I wasn’t comfortable pretending or betting that my body would cooperate and give me the orgasm we both wanted me to have. It would take a couple hours of chatting before I even felt warmed up enough to the idea of having sex. I wanted it, sure… but really, I just wanted the ability to say that I did it.
By 23, I’d had 23 sexual partners—and nothing more.
After having my heart broken more times than I could count both romantically and platonically, I finally thought that #23 might be the one.
After a heartfelt and vulnerable 7-hour conversation until dawn, leading up to an incredible date that ended in sensually connected and intimate sex… He suddenly distanced himself until I never heard from him again.
I was distraught. But for the past 5 years, I’d had one thing that always picked my confidence back up: dating apps. A few nights out with some fellas would surely bring back my charisma, right?
But it didn’t.
I felt nothing. I was swiping and swiping and trying to convince myself that I wanted to meet these people for something R-rated. But really, I just wanted to be in the arms of someone who I could talk to about my feelings. That was always the best part about the sex for me: the part when it was over, when we could talk and learn more about each other, having shared a unique and intimate experience.
I couldn’t understand why my usual method of motivation wasn’t giving me what it had done through all of those years. I guess after years of school, therapy, and experiences… My “body count” wasn’t enough anymore.
It was as frustrating as it was enlightening.
Here I was, in my time of need, and my go-to therapeutic solution was failing me! How could I possibly have been lying to myself for so many years?! The one thing that seemed the most normal and socially acceptable about me was now somehow nuanced and indescribably complicated.
The timing was serendipitous for so many things in my life. I had just moved from my college town to a completely different state. I had cut contact with my family and toxic friends. My crappy job had me reconsidering everything I wanted in life. My inescapable loneliness left me boundless time for intense self-reflection.
I’ve always struggled with using labels to help define me as a person. Accepting the mental health diagnoses I’ve sought in adulthood has felt imposing, connecting to my ancestral roots has felt appropriative, and getting constantly excluded and ostracized through my life has left a deep-seated fear that spiraled into a never-ending habit of trying to prove my self-worth without room for error. And labels– if judged wrong– were errors.
But I started to put together the pieces…
- Fixations of finding true love…
- Dating in order to fit in and be desirable…
- Receiving praise for my sexy skillset…
- Loving the rise but hating the fall of every date…
- Only liking audio porn…
As a Black cisgendered woman, I assumed there were a lot of things I couldn’t be:
- Anxious, because I liked being around others
- Autistic, because I made an extreme effort to be liked
- Abstinent, because my body was the one thing men liked about me
And finally:
- Ace/Graysexual, because I had had a lot of sex with various men.
Giving myself these titles feels wrong—no, it feels illegal. I’ve never been the poster example of anything, much less as a person who has eccentricities that come with explanations. I’m just “that weird Black girl” and these labels are just excuses.
Or maybe…
Maybe discovering who I am, what I need, and what I want, without worrying about what’s “right”, turned into my Happiest Ever After of them all.
I never quite understood the idea that labels are all bad; they are simply just tools that help us navigate in the world we live in.
Letters, after all, use labels to get to where they need to go.
So perhaps I should begin using my labels as tools, too. However, and whenever, it helps.
About the writer:
For Lexie Bee, every awkward date or failed-flirty encounter is a new avenue for growth, connection, and of course: storytelling! Finally coming into her own as a self-described ‘Pokedex of Intersectionality’ with her race, culture, gender, sexuality, class, and neurodiversity, Coffee & Kink is her debut into public and professional conversations about her sex life– past, present, and evolving. With the duality of comedy and conversation, she aspires to give others the confidence to speak without shame (especially if you’re sitting at the table with her!)